multiplication table," muttered the
father. "I wish he would learn his lessons in the daytime, so that we
could sleep in peace at night."

The next morning Keith had forgotten all about it but his mother
reminded him of what had happened during the night in order to find out
whether he had any bad dreams. Keith shook his head. Then a thought
flashed through his mind.

"Do I often talk in my sleep," he asked.

"Hardly ever," said his mother. "But the other night you read the Lord's
Prayer from beginning to end, and I wish you would read it as nicely
when are saying your prayers before going to sleep."

"He is studying too much," Granny put in from the kitchen. "His nose is
always buried in a book. That's the whole trouble, I tell you."

"No, mamma, I don't think reading does him any harm," said Keith's
mother, and for some reason Keith felt relieved by the diversion.

XX

Even Keith could not escape a feeling about this time of having arrived
at some sort of station or landmark on his road through life.

He was frightfully self-centred. He seemed to be thinking about nothing
but himself. In reality, however, he was not reflecting at all on the
character and probable course of his life. It was all a matter of
feeling and what concerned him was merely the comforts or discomforts,
pleasures or pains, exhilarations or boredoms of the passing moment. The
future was a word that, at the most, implied things that might happen a
few days after tomorrow. The convinced visioning of events a year or
more distant was still utterly beyond him. And the past seemed to vanish
with the setting sun of the day just ended.

Yet he was dimly aware of facing a transition that, somehow, must make a
great change in his entire life. Something that he could not define was
drawing to an end, and something else, equally indefinable, was about to
begin. The "school for small children" which he had left, and the
"school for boys" into which he would soon enter, were the symbols used
by his mind to express the passing out of one phase of life into
another, but as such they suggested the actual change without revealing
it. And there were moments when Keith's vague efforts to look ahead were
accompanied by a sense of crushing dread, while at other times they
might fill him with a never before tasted fervor of existence.

He was near the completion of his ninth year. It seemed quite an age,
but this appearance was contradicted by troubleso